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The ethanol conspiracy

BenBurch said:
Possibly, except for the objection that human food from arable land is being diverted to fuel. We are on the verge of a world-wide food shortage owing to the complete lack of political will to enforce population control.
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How exactly does one enforce world-wide population control?
 
BenBurch said:
Possibly, except for the objection that human food from arable land is being diverted to fuel. We are on the verge of a world-wide food shortage owing to the complete lack of political will to enforce population control.
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Actually it's nothing to do with population control, it's got more to do with idiots being in charge. There is plenty of food to go around if it could get to where where it needs to and at reasonable prices. Add in countries that are more interested in going to war with each other or internally reducing their production, and then we have issues. Zimbawe used to be the foodbowl of Africa, but over the last 10 years it has been turned into a dustbowl through politics. In Jamacia the people starve while food rots in the markets because it is priced out of reach of the poeople that desperately need it. Get the speculators out of the market, direct the food where it needs to go and remove those that stand in the way of it's production, and then we'll all be far better off.
 
Slayhamlet said:
How exactly does one enforce world-wide population control?
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If families with more than two children pay double the tax of families with only two or less, that would work for most of the planet.

A huge one-time payment for completion of sterilization surgery would work pretty good in the rest of the world where incomes are too low for tax rates to matter.

And I live what I preach; I had a vasectomy one month after my second child was born because I believe it is immoral to have more than two children.
 
PhantomWolf said:
A... There is plenty of food to go around if it could get to where where it needs to and at reasonable prices. ...
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Nope.

We are very near the carrying capacity of the planet.

Here is a ballpark calculation, might be too optimistic, might be too pessimistic, but not by much;

There are 148,940,000 km^2 of surface area on the planet.

Arable land is 13.13% is 19,809,020 km^2.

Permanent agriculture is 4.71% or 7,015,074 km^2

The amount of land required to feed an adult human is 2395 m^2 assuming average yields and vegetable or cereal crops.

7 million km^2 is about 7x10^12 m^2 divide by 2395 is 3,000,000,000.

Three billion.

We are at twice that now, ergo, many are malnourished. (This ignores fishing and hunting, though.)

Now, if we used 100% of all arable land at the same efficiency, the number is 8 billion.

We are almost there.

We are almost at the carrying capacity now.

And as any agronomist will tell you, you cannot farm a field continuously and still keep the yield up.
 
BenBurch said:
Possibly, except for the objection that human food from arable land is being diverted to fuel. We are on the verge of a world-wide food shortage owing to the complete lack of political will to enforce population control.
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It's statements like these that fuel Alex Jones's apocalyptic fantasies of mass extermination.

You should know better, Ben.
 
Sword_Of_Truth said:
Damn... did I blow the gag for you? ;)
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No. But I realize the side-effects and welcome them.

If we do not get people to limit fertility we will have a malthusian crisis with food that will limit population via famine.

Which is preferable?

Because its gonna happen one way or the other.

And if we allow it to be famine, Soylent Green won't seem to be such a bad option to many.
 
Profanz said:
. And they have the money to stall and discourage and have been for years. Bush came into office wanting to drill in Alaska and other protected areas. This week now that gasoline is over four dollars a gallon in the states he pushed through this…

If anyone questions this they will asked if they want to be paying ten dollars a gallon next year.
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If there was a better fuel, we would use it. Please name a better fuel than gasoline, besides chocolate chip cookies, that you can market now?

Name a fuel denser in energy than gasoline. Name a system for transportation better than gasoline.

Have you ever taken a engineering study of why we use gasoline and not batteries to power our cars! Gee, electric cars are not new! If electric cars were a better system we would have electric cars! Do non be fooled by your own woo based ideas on why gasoline is locked in; the boring fact is it works better than any ideas you have not proposed yet!

Most you posts seem steeped in political woo and misinformation; why?
 
Crazy Chainsaw said:
I am thinking about Huff and Puffing my oil soon, so that it will produce a good source of income, tons of Oil leases in Kentucky with 70 percent of he oil still in the ground.
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Curiosity, not challenge: What KY fields are producing by "huff & puff"? (by which I presume you mean alternating between producing from and injecting into the same wellbore), and what makes you think it would be feasible for your reservoirs? What injection fluid? My KY RE experience is extremely limited (one field, and that was a real "dog"), but my expectation (based on even less G&G expertise) is that most of the reservoirs will be light-ish oil and probably tight-ish rock, neither of which bode well for steam H&P.

Crazy Chainsaw said:
Only 30 percent of an oil resource can be produced at the present time, Huff and Puff raises that to 60 percent total production, still leaving 40% that is unreachable.
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For the lay audience:

While those numbers may be more-or-less reasonably typical for mid-continent reservoirs without aquifers, especially those developed under $2/bbl, I feel compelled to point out that the range of recovery factors is quite broad. Still, I concur with your main point that a sizeable fraction of a reservoir's oil can't be produced by simple primary recovery (i.e. producing wells only) or even ordinary secondary recovery (i.e. supplementing reservoir energy and displacement with water or gas injection) methods.

The "classic" huff-n-puff examples are cyclic steam injection in the heavy oil reservoirs in central California, where the oil is so heavy, dead, and thick (~8-15 API [yep, some is heavier than water], nearly negligible gas/oil ratio, viscosities in thousands of centipoise) that it barely flows at original reservoir temperatures. Steam is injected into the well for some period (days to weeks) to literally heat the oil to reduce its viscosity and provide some displacement energy to drive it back to the well when it's returned to production (often after a more-or-less brief "soak" period).

In those reservoirs (high porosity and permeability, very low initial water saturations) H&P recovery can approach 100% locally and 90% overall -- if you don't discount for the oil you burn to make the steam, and if you're cool with drilling wells as close as every half-acre (not a pretty sight IMO). With the thick, dead (read: little dissolved gas) oil, primary recovery would only be the very few percent that could be driven by rock and liquid compressibility (and possibly establishment of the small "critical" gas saturation that's too disconnected to flow).

Sure, you gotta burn something to make the steam, but if you burn part of the oil you wouldn't get without the steam you still come out ahead (carbon emissions notwithstanding). More recently it's become fashionable and economically feasible to burn natural gas in a co-generation facility to produce the steam needed to produce that nasty gunky tar-like oil. While such cogen facilities do also produce electricity that's needed in the area, I fail to understand how burning nice, clean, portable gas to produce steam to produce that oil is a good idea in the broader sense.
 
DavidS said:
I fail to understand how burning nice, clean, portable gas to produce steam to produce that oil is a good idea in the broader sense.
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everything translates back into money, if you burn 10 dollars of gasoline to recover 20 dollars of oil you come out on top, even if you arent getting 10 dollars of gasoline back from that oil

if the world economy worked on a barter system it might be different, lol
 
BenBurch said:
Possibly, except for the objection that human food from arable land is being diverted to fuel. We are on the verge of a world-wide food shortage owing to the complete lack of political will to enforce population control.
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What exactly are you advocating here? Who exactly would do the enforcing? and how?
 
DavidS said:
Curiosity, not challenge: What KY fields are producing by "huff & puff"? (by which I presume you mean alternating between producing from and injecting into the same wellbore), and what makes you think it would be feasible for your reservoirs? What injection fluid? My KY RE experience is extremely limited (one field, and that was a real "dog"), but my expectation (based on even less G&G expertise) is that most of the reservoirs will be light-ish oil and probably tight-ish rock, neither of which bode well for steam H&P.


For the lay audience:

While those numbers may be more-or-less reasonably typical for mid-continent reservoirs without aquifers, especially those developed under $2/bbl, I feel compelled to point out that the range of recovery factors is quite broad. Still, I concur with your main point that a sizeable fraction of a reservoir's oil can't be produced by simple primary recovery (i.e. producing wells only) or even ordinary secondary recovery (i.e. supplementing reservoir energy and displacement with water or gas injection) methods.

The "classic" huff-n-puff examples are cyclic steam injection in the heavy oil reservoirs in central California, where the oil is so heavy, dead, and thick (~8-15 API [yep, some is heavier than water], nearly negligible gas/oil ratio, viscosities in thousands of centipoise) that it barely flows at original reservoir temperatures. Steam is injected into the well for some period (days to weeks) to literally heat the oil to reduce its viscosity and provide some displacement energy to drive it back to the well when it's returned to production (often after a more-or-less brief "soak" period).

In those reservoirs (high porosity and permeability, very low initial water saturations) H&P recovery can approach 100% locally and 90% overall -- if you don't discount for the oil you burn to make the steam, and if you're cool with drilling wells as close as every half-acre (not a pretty sight IMO). With the thick, dead (read: little dissolved gas) oil, primary recovery would only be the very few percent that could be driven by rock and liquid compressibility (and possibly establishment of the small "critical" gas saturation that's too disconnected to flow).

Sure, you gotta burn something to make the steam, but if you burn part of the oil you wouldn't get without the steam you still come out ahead (carbon emissions notwithstanding). More recently it's become fashionable and economically feasible to burn natural gas in a co-generation facility to produce the steam needed to produce that nasty gunky tar-like oil. While such cogen facilities do also produce electricity that's needed in the area, I fail to understand how burning nice, clean, portable gas to produce steam to produce that oil is a good idea in the broader sense.
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The fields around here are simular to the big sinking field, in eastern Kentucky,only smaller, they are simple water floods that have never had any advanced recovery methods applied.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=6216345

If all goes well massive amounts of low cost carbon dioxide will soon be availiable here.

A new cyclic method of steam, water with sulfactants, and gas, injection shows great promise in these fields, I am working on a portable unit, (truck mounted) portable steam and gas injection unit, for such small water floods.

I am also looking at heating the reservoir directly to cause a chemical reaction freeing the light oil from the heavy oil that clogs the sandstone formations.
However since I have not patented that process or know if it is ecconomically productive I do not wish to comment further upon it.

Carbon Dioxide may soon become very cheap in the local area.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080524/BUSINESS/805240448
 
Crazy Chainsaw said:
The fields around here are simular to the big sinking field, in eastern Kentucky,only smaller, they are simple water floods that have never had any advanced recovery methods applied.
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Small world -- guess the name of the one Kentucky field I referenced above. I ate quite a few lunches at the "Standing Rock Petroleum Club". Beautiful country.

Lest I be taken to have publicly insulted your assets and efforts, I should clarify my "dog" reference above. By that I mean production rates, reserves per well, and operating margins are too low to be of significant value to a semi-major or large independent oil producing company, especially considering their greater bureaucratic burden and capital investment opportunities. My expectation that such fields could noticeably alter the American petroleum supply or pricing picture is somewhat less than my fear of personal spontaneous combustion.

That doesn't mean they're worthless, however, especially to a small independent operator. With careful attention to expenses they can make a little money even against soft oil prices, and those expenses needn't go up much just because prices and production do. Also, every barrel you make from there is as good as one from under a mile of Gulf of Mexico water.

Good luck with your EOR efforts! You won't be keeping OPEC awake nights, but you very well might enhance your reserves and value.

Thanks for the field trial reference, I'll give it a read. (from the abstract it's clear that my Big Sinking work was unrelated and some years earlier)

<end derail>
 
BenBurch said:
Answered already above; I'd make it economically difficult to have more than two and economically beneficial to get sterilized.

Do you have a better plan to avery global famine?
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Who would levy the economic sanctions against those who did not follow and how would it be collected?

Who would pay for the economic benefits?

China has a similar sounding policy but I do not know if it has worked out very well. I would think Catholics would take issue with any plan that encouraged sterilization and punished procreation.
 
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